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Go through hoops to understand Kim Jong Un

By Peter Lucas

Updated:
03/05/2013 08:27:05 AM EST

Maybe President Barack Obama appointed the wrong guy as secretary of state.

Dennis Rodman, the cross-dressing former NBA star, after all, just accomplished what no other American or American government official has been able to accomplish, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her replacement John F. Kerry, veteran former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Rodman, who has more gold rings on his face than people have on their fingers, met face to face last week with l'enfant terrible of the Korean Peninsula -- none other than the reclusive Kim Jong Un, the man-child leader of North Korea, which happens to be the most repressive country in the world.

While envoys sent to North Korea by President Obama last summer to warn of new nuclear tests, and offer a thaw in relations, failed to meet with Kim Jong Un, Rodman, in a most unusual visit, was embraced by the enigmatic North Korean leader.

Not only that, Rodman came back with a message, saying that Kim wants Obama to call him. "He wants Obama to do one thing," Rodman told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. "Call him."

Earlier, Rodman, 51, told the Supreme Leader of North Korea, "You have a friend for life." The two bonded during a Harlem Globetrotters-North Korea basketball game before thousands in Pyongyang, the capital, last week.

The teams were made up of North Koreans with two American Globetrotters on each side.

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Later the Dear Leader held a cocktail party for the ballplayers and the crew filming the event at which people, in an unlikely North Korean development, got hammered, according to a Twitter message from the event.

Upon leaving the country last Friday, Rodman commenting on his new friend Kim, who hugged him at the airport: "Guess what? I love him. The guy's really awesome."

Pyongyang is the capital of a country that, despite the abject misery of its starving people, is not only on its way to developing long-range rocketry to deliver a nuclear weapon across the Pacific Ocean to the United States, a country Kim has promised to destroy.

The 29-year-old, basketball-loving Dear Leader, who has been on the job for a year, has also promised the "miserable destruction" of U.S. military forces in South Korea should the U.S. participate in joint military exercises with South Korea this month.

The United States has some 30,000 troops in South Korea, mainly along the 38th Parallel, which is the border that separates the two Koreas. North Korea is still technically at war with the U.S. and South Korea.

Despite Obama's campaign promises about meeting with leaders of all nations, "friend or foe," Rodman and the several members of his basketball party are believed to be the only Americans to have met with the North Korean leader, who has thumbed his nose at the U.S. and the United Nations.

Rodman's bizarre visit to the bizarre country was filmed by Vice Media for an HBO special. But, strange as it seems, Rodman and the basketball players who traveled with him could probably supply Obama with more information about the strange and unpredictable North Korean leader than the secretary of state or anyone else.

The optics alone are interesting. Here at the same time, you had stories about Kerry, the politician, and Rodman, the professional showman, on opposite sides of the planet dealing with countries -- Iran and North Korea -- that are developing nuclear weapons to use against the United States and U.S. interests.

The United States is bracketed between two antagonistic countries that are arming with nuclear weapons. One country is run by Islamist fundamentalists and the other by a sort of political Psy, the Gangnam Style Korean rapper dude.

While we encourage and participate in talks with Iran that go nowhere, we have no dialogue at all the with the North Koreans.

State Department Spokesman Patrick Ventrell said there were no plans to debrief Rodman. Oozing traditional state department arrogance, Ventrell said, "We haven't been in touch with this party at all. If there are Americans who after traveling in North Korea want to get in touch with us or have something to share with us, we take phone calls."

After first firing this guy, Obama should bring Rodman to the White House. Rodman may be a whack job, but he's our whack job. Right now he knows more about the mysterious Kim Jong Un, the man who wants to nuke us, than any other American, including Obama, Kerry and the spooks at the CIA.

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